The Prestidigitator

It took me over 2 years to work up the courage to completely (no dual boot!) switch to a Linux distribution; and I’ve finally done it. Linux Mint 4.0 (Daryna). It took most of my day (and Swen’s) yesterday to complete the move and I have to say, I can’t help but me amazed by the possibilities.

Installation was a breeze, took all of fifteen minutes and configuring the system was easier. Most of the stuff worked straight out of the box, including the video, sound and graphics drivers. Installed Compiz Effects (a compositing window manager) which makes Vista look like a cheap knock off.

What I did have was a little trouble with getting the net set up but that was because my new ISP uses the PPPoE protocol. A bit of googling fixed that ($ sudo pppoeconf at the terminal window solves everything) and I was online to get live support that got me through the rest of the process.

I remember complaining about how Linux was a major pain to use back in college but boy has it come a long way in the last 2 years!

Natalie has a better personality now. Way better.

[YouTube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQDJWi9yrTw]

Heath Ledger (1979-2008)

28 years. Shit. Watching The Dark Knight will be so very surreal now.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1060277/ 

Don’t believe the hype. Cloverfield is a terrible, nauseating and utterly pointless piece of cinema catering mostly to today’s attention deficit generation. No matter what they tell you, the camera work is not clever, it’s maddening.

Now that’s out of the way, it does have a couple of redeeming qualities (none of which redeem the film as a whole); the set design is tremendous, the ‘monster‘ itself is like nothing we’ve seen before and the theme that plays through the closing credits is brilliant. That’s about it.

3/10

16 dollars down the drain. Frick!

Sidney Lumet is living proof that age is never a deterrent. The 83 year old master auteur has crafted what I can safely say is one of the finest films in the last few years; painfully intense, deeply disturbing and layered with nuances that no other film maker his age is capable of depicting.

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is not an ordinary botched heist story; it ends up being something much more-a poem about men thrust into circumstances that drag them into an abyss of moral ambiguities, ethical dilemmas and disturbing questions about the nature of loyalty, love and family. Hank (Ethan Hawke) and Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman) are brothers who resort to desperate measures in desperate times. The older Andy, mired in drugs and debt proposes a victim less crime and convinces the younger Hank to rob a jewelery store that is insured; the only catch being that the store is owned by their parents.

The job goes wrong and the mother ends up being fatally shot. What follows is a complex analysis of seemingly simple people, people who could very well be us, people who for the life of them cannot come to terms with their actions. Andy is an egomaniac (stressed by an opening scene where he stares at himself in the mirror whilst making love to his trophy wife), Hank is the over parented younger son who can never seem to get by on his own and Charles is the father who is in a constant state of denial.

Lumet employs an overlapping time sequence and retells the story from the points of view of the various characters. I cannot seem to get over the fact that Lumet shows the vitality and sharpness of a film maker half his age. If you’ve seen his earlier films (Network, Dog Day Afternoon), you’ll know that the director has perfected the art of cinematic voyeurism, he gives you front row seats to the mayhem in the lives of ordinary individuals.

I stress ordinary because everything about every frame is ordinary, in an extraordinary way. You can hear the ambient sounds of clocks, copiers, telephones, cars and what not…all intended to give the viewer a feel of the dingy dark recesses of the human mind in spite of the seeming normalcy that surrounds the protagonists. He has taken this a step further by using high definition digital video which only accentuates the grittiness.

Before the devil Knows You’re Dead is a wonderfully restrained drama that proves without the shadow of a doubt the genius that is Sidney Lumet.

10/10

Seen near Southbank, Melbourne.

Yet again, I find myself in an existential funk.

Just when you think things are going pretty well, you make the mistake of ‘reevaluating’ your life and the choices you’ve made over the years. And just like every other time, the resulting epiphanies are dime a dozen and as always, a little disturbing.

I find solace only in the knowledge that there is nothing beer and a week long vacation can’t remedy.

If there’s one breed of vermin that deserves zero respect/sympathy/empathy, it’s the one that comments without abandon on sites like YouTube and Redditt. Going through some of the comments on YouTube (as entertaining as some of them are) is pretty much all the proof we need for dysgenics. For the average internet junkie, sitting in the confines of his/her room is all the empowerment he/she needs to air his/her retarded views onto an unsuspecting world. Most of the time they end up being just plain ridiculous and sometimes marginally offensive.

(Click to view)

There is a comment that shows up beneath an article on Wired,

I want to destroy young generation of India Delhi is the best place to do bomb blast in SouthDelhi mainly in Mohammad Pur, Nehru place buildings, Vasant vihar flats, RK Puram Lodhi Road, Sarojani Nagar are the best place to do the bomb blast and do lot of casualties. Lot of Colleges are are also the best place to do bomb blast if anyone will do bomb blast here then there are maximum casuilties done and ISI will become happy. I want to Tell that if anyone want to carry bomb laptop leather bag is very good for this.
Put the bomb in the leather bag.

Include punctuations where necessary to make sense of what you just read. How exactly do you react to something like this?

Additional Links:

• An interesting read by Andrew Chen
• What You Tube comments really mean